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Aqui está Cramer, polémico como sempre. Desta vez, a vítima é a Fed...

"A Fed of Little Faith"

By James J. Cramer
RealMoney Columnist
5/5/2004 8:26 AM EDT


"What the heck is the Federal Reserve afraid of? Does it not believe the economy is growing? Is the Fed's unwillingness to raise rates the real reason that companies like Kimberly-Clark (KMB:NYSE - commentary - research) and Avon (AVP:NYSE - commentary - research) are the places to be, because the growth is phony and if we take the stimulation away, it will collapse? Isn't that what the Fed is saying by taking rates down to an emergency level and keeping them there, even though we have ample signs of a boom?

The more the Fed waits, the more measured the Fed is -- even as it removes the word "measured" -- the more I understand why the best-performing stocks are the ones that require no economic growth. That's because the market detects that the Fed itself has no confidence in our economy's ability to grow without its help.


That's dreadful and, I believe, wrong, but when you have a Fed that ignores all economic data -- all data, including the last two months of employment data -- you begin to think, like the buyers of Procter & Gamble (PG:NYSE - commentary - research) and Clorox (CLX:NYSE - commentary - research), that the economy still is doing nothing in particular.

I put it like this because, frankly, I think that the Fed has created a mindset of worry about growth that has permeated both Main Street and Wall Street. We keep pushing out the Big, Bad Event because, well, the Fed thinks the economy isn't really growing strongly.

I wouldn't care about any of this if I didn't fear that the Fed will wake up one day and say, "We are behind the curve -- we have strong growth and we have to move in 50 basis-point increments until we get the target to 4% to 5%."

Remember that in 2001, rates went to 6.5% because of the booming economy. That was the worst time ever to have the rates that high. The economy was falling apart!

Same Fed. Same guys. Same mistakes?

Let's hope not"

(in www.realmoney.com)